Prepared Statement Of
GENERAL JOHN W. HANDY
VICE CHIEF OF STAFF
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
26 June 2001
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you and discuss the readiness of the finest aerospace force in the world: America's Air Force. Over the past year, our men and women in blue have continued to protect our nation's interests across the full spectrum of engagement. From humanitarian assistance to contingency operations, aerospace power has provided our theater commanders with the capability for rapid, decisive action in support of our national interests. Our transformation to an Expeditionary Aerospace Force has been a key component of our success. Using this concept, we have been able to continuously assign and deploy Aerospace Expeditionary Forces (AEFs) around the world. Today, we have almost 87,000 airmen deployed or forward stationed, ensuring the security of the United States and our allies around the world.
Our successes notwithstanding, we are confronted with a number of issues. Recruiting and retention are a recurring concern in today's competitive environment. Aging aircraft and infrastructure have greatly challenged our readiness. The changing global security environment demands we evaluate our future organization, concepts of operation, and capabilities to ensure we remain relevant now and in the future. To address these challenges, recapitalizing and modernizing our force becomes imperative. We must emphasize science and technology, improve our partnerships with industry, expand our capabilities in space, and become more efficient in all our efforts.
PEOPLE
We are the finest aerospace force in the world largely because we have the finest Airmen in the world. Our challenge is to recruit the best of America's youth while retaining our highly skilled and experienced force. These are not easy tasks in the face of intense competition from the private sector.
Your continuing support has helped us meet our recruiting goals without lowering our standards. Enlistment bonuses, adjusted pay initiatives, retirement reforms, and improvements in medical benefits helped us reach our FY00 recruiting goals. They have kept us on track to meet our goals again this year.
Recruiting is only part of the equation. Retention is critical to the health of our force as well. In fact, we have the highest retention goals of any service-the Air Force is the retention force. We rely on a cadre of dedicated, skilled Airmen to keep our aircraft flying, our satellites operating, and all of our systems continuously ready for employment. The skills of these Airmen are in great demand in the commercial world. Our people are talented, disciplined, and drug-free; they are wonderful citizens and workers, and companies everywhere want them. In short, the strong pull from the private sector in combination with other factors has resulted in several years of depressed retention, creating experience shortfalls in a variety of career fields across our force.
In the face of these challenges, we are grateful for your steadfast support that has allowed us to extend and expand reenlistment bonuses, increase housing allowances, and expand Montgomery GI Bill benefits. We are cautiously optimistic that we have turned the corner on first-term enlisted retention. The rate has been at or above our 55% goal for seven consecutive months.
We continue to work on our second-term and career reenlistment rates. Their decline appears to have leveled off for now-thanks in no small part to the assistance of the Administration, Congress, and this Committee. We still have a lot of work to do in order to restore these rates to the desired level that will sustain the force. In the meantime, the cumulative effects of shortfalls in second-term and career reenlistments have created gaps in experience that reduce our ability to perform our day-to-day mission. They also take away from our ability to train the new recruits who must replace our experienced Airmen who have moved on to other endeavors. Creating an experienced force is the work of years-once lost, it is not quickly regained.
We continue to face challenges with officer retention as well, for many of the same reasons we have struggled with enlisted retention. The pilot shortage is one manifestation of this effect. The aviation continuation pay program you supported, along with an overall reduction in our requirements for rated staff officers, has kept our pilot shortage at 1,200, even in the midst of an already aggressive airline hiring campaign.
Ultimately, we believe our transformation to an Expeditionary Aerospace Force-with the stability of its predictable rotation schedules-combined with initiatives in pay and benefits, will move us closer to our retention goals.
READINESS
We would like to express our thanks to the Administration, Congress, and this Committee for the continuing support we've received to help us work on our most critical readiness issues. You've provided increased funding to bolster our most pressing readiness concerns, enabling us to arrest a startling rate of decline. Your support of the FY01 supplemental will help us hold the line and maintain our readiness, albeit at its current less-than-acceptable level. We need your continued support, especially in modernizing our aging aircraft fleet, in order to improve our readiness.
Your United States Air Force is currently operating the oldest fleet of aircraft in its history. At present, our aircraft are 22 years old on average, and growing older. Our aging fleet costs more to operate and maintain in both effort and dollars. The destructive combination of depressed retention among our skilled maintainers and the unpredictable and more frequent breakage on older aircraft creates a challenging situation to stabilizing readiness. Last year we flew 97% of our programmed flying hours, but due to a variety of factors, at 103% of the programmed cost. Over the past 5 years, we have noted an increase of nearly 50% in our Flying Hour costs. We are working harder and spending more just to maintain level flight.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND PHYSICAL PLANT RECAPITALIZATION
We face many challenges in maintaining our infrastructure and physical plant, as well. In an era of constrained resources and competing requirements, we have been forced to use infrastructure as a bill payer to help us shore up readiness. We greatly appreciate your construction budget adds, but even with your help we are still far short of the industry standard for physical plant recapitalization. Today, our military family homes are 37 years old on average while our plant facilities are 40 years old. We have a $5.6 billion backlog for maintaining our real property that represents documented problems, with documented repair costs we cannot afford to pay. We have challenges in sustaining, restoring, and modernizing our infrastructure that detract from our readiness by reducing the quality of life and quality of service our people and their families experience in their living and working facilities. These growing repair costs further contribute to our retention and readiness challenges.
MODERNIZATION
Our aircraft are getting older and their average age continues to increase. Even if we execute our planned modernization program, our aircraft continue to grow older. By the year 2020, their average age will be nearly 30 years old.
Subject to the outcome of Secretary Rumsfeld's strategic review, the Air Force needs to aggressively modernize its capabilities. We have transformed our force organizationally with the Expeditionary Aerospace Force concept, but we are faced with diminishing returns as we are forced to work harder and spend more to operate our aging systems. We need to couple our ongoing aerospace, precision, and information initiatives with advances in continuous global surveillance, directed energy, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Your Air Force is committed to a future of innovation and ongoing transformation to assure we continue to provide the aerospace power that assures the safety and security of our national interests.
Summary
Your United States Air Force is a dedicated force of professional men and women who protect our nation's interests through the exploitation of the aerospace medium. The nation and its citizens have placed their trust and confidence in us and we have not-and will not-let them down. We are in the midst of trying times, however. We continue to work harder and spend more just to hold the line on our current level of readiness. We continue to work on recruiting and retaining a high-quality force in a competitive economy, while confronting the modernization challenges of our aging fleet and infrastructure.
We are committed to working with you, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the other Services to evaluate the most appropriate aerospace strategy for the evolving security environment. We must pay special attention to the shrinking military-industrial base and evaluate methods for improving our current acquisition processes. To that end, we are actively seeking ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our processes, including leveraging the best business practices found in both government and industry. Finally, the statements made in this testimony are contingent upon the results of Secretary Rumsfeld's strategic review. Please consider them in that light. Thank you again for your support as we continue to work together to bolster the readiness of America's Air Force, protecting our nation's interests and ensuring "No One Comes Close."
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